The Simple Trick That Improve Your Workouts

This Simple Trick Can Instantly Improve All Of Your Workouts

I remember the quiet ride home from the gym. I didn’t even turn the radio on. I slammed the car in park and seconds later I was on the other side of my front door ripping my shirt over my head and launching it across the room. Workouts weren’t supposed to be this hard.

Actually, the workout wasn’t that difficult. I remembered knocking off a couple miles on a treadmill next to a young woman that would have crushed me on a road run, then a few rounds of pull-ups, dips and pushups. I never made it over to the free weights. I already felt like I wanted to throw up. And when I got home I was pissed.

I sat on the floor and leaned my wet torso against the edge of the couch. Why won’t my body play along with my plan to look like a gladiator? Why am I completely trashed after 40 minutes in the gym, 10 of which I spent on my cell phone. I didn’t go back for three weeks.

All the excuses to skip my next session were sitting right there and I used them all. It was too late in the evening. I didn’t eat enough that day. Sheesh, how I could I still be this sore? My stomach hurts. I’ve got that meeting in the morning. The truth was that I just didn’t want to feel that way again. Because it sucks to suck at something. And I wasn’t showing up to the gym to leave feeling worse about myself than when I walked in. That’s not how this works.

That’s when I remembered an important lesson I learned years ago. The secret to helping you get in the best shape of your life: Stop caring so much.

That’s right. If you want to be fitter and healthier — if you want to be more athletic and more consistent — stop caring so damn much. Most of us aren’t training to become professional athletes. We’re training for health. We want to feel better and we want to look better with our clothes on the floor. And we want to make sure that our Instagram photos are #MCW worthy.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t track your progress. You absolutely should take stock of how you feel, monitor your improvement and adjust accordingly. But you shouldn’t lose sleep because you’re not sure if you’ve calculated your macronutrients properly. When you decide be perfect, you’ve already set the table to fail and you’re more likely to give up, like a kid who can’t reach the expert level of a Playstation game and instead throws the remote control across the room, declaring “this game sucks.”

Perfectionism, in this respect, is not a system of caring. It is, instead, a manifestation of fear and the fear of failure is without question one of life’s many great motivators. But it can also handcuff us. And worse, it is a distraction. You don’t need to care so much. What you do need is perspective.

In Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, there’s an anecdote about a boy who goes to see a wise man to learn the secret of happiness. He travels a great distance to meet a wise man in a castle atop a mountain who is too busy to take is questions. The wise man instead invites the boy to explore the massive castle, giving him a spoon filled with oil. His only instruction was that the boy return without spilling the oil.

When the boy does return (oil intac), the wise man asked if he had noticed the beauty of the castle. Embarrassed, the boy told the man that he had not. So the wise man sends him out again, this time to take in all he had missed. The boy returns, this time having seen the Persian tapestries, beautiful garden and the parchments in the library. But he returned with an empty spoon.

The key to happiness, the wise man said, was to see life’s beauty without losing sight of the oil on the spoon. In other words, keep an eye on the goal but enjoy the journey. You cannot focus so intently on the end goal that you miss the path to get there. Accept the fact that on your fitness journey, you will spill a little oil.

Building the body you want, getting a new job, scoring a promotion or crushing an important presentation will not come without pitfalls or setbacks. Understanding that this is all part of the process keeps you working toward your goal without being roadblocked by failures — a missed workout, a bad meal or not dropping weight/not gaining muscle as fast as you hoped.

The other thing you’ll need is perseverance or what Angela Duckworth called “grit” in a widely acclaimed TED Talk in 2013. Duckworth’s research explored what made the difference in how individuals achieved exceptional levels of success, with things like talent and intelligence being equal. Individuals that measured higher levels of grit or, in other words, resilience, tenacity or toughness tended to achieve higher levels of success, in this case higher education, achievements or test scores.

When it comes to our fitness, whether it is to drop 20 pounds for health reasons or to carve out a six-pack for beach season, the pressure we feel is internal. It is our requirement succeed in an arbitrary time period and to reach a magic number on a weight scale or achieve a hashtag-appropriate physique.

Building strength is a mental game and it requires you to take some of the pressure off. In Amy Morin’s book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, she explained the mentally strong don’t feel sorry for themselves and don’t resist change. But what’s also important is that they do not spend time dwelling on the past. And when it comes to your fitness journey or your last workout, the past begins the moment it’s over.

You can not change the mistake you made. You can’t undo that extra cheat meal or rewind time and go a harder in yesterday’s training session. But you can be better today. And even better tomorrow.